System builders … wake up!

They’are at it again. Just been talking to another customer with one of the most wasted hardware configurations I’ve ever come across. We regularly talk to gurus in the graphics and media industry who want the fastest possible machine they can get. Some want redundancy, some don’t care (so some use R5 and some use R0).

So the customer has spent oodles on 2 CPU, truckloads of RAM, a video card that would run Avatar, an Adaptec 5805 (good choice) and a bunch of WD Raptor SATA drives.

Sounds like a corker of a system. However, the system builder set it up like this:

2 x 300gb drives in R1 for OS
4 x 300gb drives in R10 for data
2 x 150gb drives in R0 for OS swapfile

Next, the power saving settings:

OS array - spin down after 2 hours inactivity
Data array - spin down after 1 hour inactivity
OS swapfile array - spin down after 30 minutes inactivity

There is some sort of backplane involved, and 3 of the drives are only connecting to the card at 1.5Gb/s rather than 3Gb (haven’t worked out why but I’ll be looking for drive jumpers).

To top it all off, write cache is disabled.

Now why on earth would you do this? I truly struggle to understand how you could build a system like this. The customer runs Windows 7 (some version or other of that wonderful new toy) and spends his time opening and closing 50-80gb files. The system is (a) not running anywhere near like it should and (b) is underdone severely on capacity.

So how would I have built this system …

8 x 300gb drives
1 x 100-150gb R10 for the OS and swapfile
1 x R5 taking up the rest of the disk space

Battery or no battery, ZMCP or no ZMCP, the write cache will be turned on. All drives will be connecting at 3Gb or replaced until they do. Power timers will be the same for both arrays. Probably around the 2 hour mark of inactivity will see the drives spinning down.

The OS will benefit from R10 … it’s relatively random in nature. I actually don’t think the customer will even stress his swapfile because he has a lot (and I mean a lot) of RAM in the system but it will sit nicely on the R10 as well.

The data will sit on the R5. Since the files are large (very large) and are completely sequential in nature, R5 will both read and write quicker than R10 in this scenario. The usable space of this drive will be over 1.5tb, which is a whole lot better than the 600gb the customer currently receives from his current config.

The system will be (a) much simpler and (b) much faster.

It would seem to me that system builders are just not taking customer needs and requirements into consideration when building systems. They are simply plodding along with the same old same old as they have for years, and the customers are suffering because of it.

If this end user wants to really get his machine up and running he is up for a total system rebuild and a couple of new drives. We may settle for OS and swapfile on a 150gb mirror, with a R5 over the 6 300gb drives, but that will be a financial consideration for the customer because he’s already been sold the current disk config.

When you build a system using an Adaptec RAID card, install the management software (Adaptec Storage Manager). Look at the properties of everything and check if all is working well. When you build a RAID 5 array use clear or build/verify … don’t use “quick init” … it’s dodgy and will make the array run like a dog until it’s verified.

But more than anything else … think about what the customer needs and if you don’t know how to build the system, admit it and talk to Adaptec … surprisingly our advice is free.

Ciao
Neil